Helping Sighted Folks with Their iPhones

By Misty Dawn, 24 June, 2013

Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Surely, at least some of you have encountered the following situation. Your sighted relative/friend wants to know how to do this or that on their iPhone. You try to explain it to them and they say, "I don't see anywhere." You finally come to realize that your verbal VoiceOver representation is, for them, some graphical symbol or other which you can't see. How do you guys help the sighted person figure out their phone in those situations? Is there anywhere where I can find explanations ofthe graphical symbols and their locations onscreen that are represented by verbal VoiceOver cues?

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Comments

By sockhopsinger on Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - 07:22

You might direct them to turn Voiceover on on their iPhone. You should be able to direct them to it seeing as the default iPhone screens are the same if they haven't gone mucking around and rearranged the icons. Once it is turned on, make sure the screen curtain is off, which it should be by default. Then, show them where you are touching on the screen. Don't flick through, necessarily. It may be necessary to drag your finger around the screen in order to demonstrate where things are as flicking would not be as helpful to a sight-impaired person. Hopefully this will help somewhat.

By Chelsea on Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - 07:22

I would agree with the previous poster. Another thing I do is keep up with various mainstream blogs and podcasts on ios. This often gives me a sense of how sighted people do things on their iphones. For example, the add button is usually represented graphically by a plus symbol. It will be interesting to see how the visual changes in ios 7 will affect this relationship.

By Cliff on Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - 07:22

If you turn the screen curtain off and leave Voiceover on, you can easily help your sighted friends and family. When you find an item with Voiceover on, say a button, it is highlighted on the screen. Thus the sighted person can see which button you have found. Though they don't double-tap, they can still see what they need to do to get the job done.

Also, the very nature of VoiceOver letting you explore by touch (no trademark infringement intended, Google) makes this easier than it would be with a conventional screen reader, even if you can't show them in person. Say you're texting someone and they can't see the button you're talking about. You can drag around on the screen til you find the button, then see what's around it and let them know, "It's just to the right of that one thing," or "It's in the top right corner," or whatever.

What does this highlight look like? I've told sighted people it's "a little square", but they seem to have a hard time locating where it is on the screen when I ask them to look for it.

Don't know what it looks like. Still, you can tell them, for instance, the Baseball app is two spaces up from the phone app. I'm just using a generic example, but I'm sure you get the picture.

By Bobcat on Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - 07:22

I wonder how people use the touchscreen in iOS without voiceover? For example: how do you close apps? Or how do they switch between open apps? Where can I go to find out? I looked at the iPhone manual and couldn't get past the table of contents.

By Apple Khmer on Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - 07:22

The best you can do is learn how things are done with and without vision. This enables me to help my friends and others who are sighted do what they need to do; from troubleshooting their smart phone, or how to do certain tasks on their computers. Example, selecting multiple items to the clipbord or for uploading to websites or social media are done differently for users who are sighted than for us. For us Mac users, depending on the OS (we'll use Yosemite) we have to use the VO keys plus the Command key, and enter to select multiple items. They on the other hand, must hold down Command while clicking the items they want.